1 mai 2010

But that went nowhere quickly — “a swing and a miss”, in the words of an industry insider — because the labels argued that streaming a single purchase to multiple devices constituted multiple uses, which meant they should receive more for the songs they sell through iTunes.

In short, Apple bought Lala for nothing, because the only reason Lala was allowed to exist was precisely that it was competing with iTunes, not operating from under the same roof.

As noted by mocoNews, the $100 mail-in rebate comes back in the form of a debit card, not a check, so those $50 and $100 price tags truly are more like $150 and $200. On top of that, Verizon’s voice and data plans for the Kin cost a minimum of $60 per month [just like the iPhone].

And that’s what Microsoft released instead of the Courier.

(On the plus side, they are reportedly super buggy, so maybe the Courier was simply canceled because they never managed to make it work. Still sad, but a better reason. Imagine what trouble you’d be in if you had to decide whether to buy the coolest device ever, that crashes every two minutes.)

8 mai

To make matters worse, say sources, Facebook is trying to get Zynga to agree to a long term deal where Zynga remains primarily on the Facebook platform. During negotiations Facebook has taken some steps to punish Zynga, such as shutting off notifications for Farmville and other games, and Facebook has threatened, say multiple sources, to simply shut some of Zynga’s games down permanently.

Wow. As far as evil monopolitic practices go, this is impressive, even for Face “All Your Data Are Belong To Us” Book.

Psychologist Joanna Starek tells us that swimmers who lie to themselves swim faster than those who do not. And we explore the power of self-deception to make us more successful, and happier, people.

From the program’s conclusion: “Time and time again researchers have found that depressed people lie less.” That’s… depressing. (Not that it’s a surprise, but it’s fascinating that actual scientific studies have proved that happiness goes along with self-delusion.)

If the web fragments into closed systems, if companies put content and applications behind walls, some indeed may thrive — but their success will come at the expense of the very creativity and innovation that has made the Internet a revolutionary force.

And that’s their defense of Flash?

All hail the Fox News strategy: say the exact opposite of the truth, and expect that everybody will swallow it without questioning, and that Adobe will win by virtue of being the last to speak up. But do they expect this to work on their customer base — when half of that base is composed of Mac users who have been cursing the OS X Flash plugin for years?

(Not that there aren’t many Flash fans taking Adobe’s side of the argument; it’s just that this bullshit is not going to convince anybody in their favor, and can only do the opposite by sheer ridiculousness.)

15 mai

The “advanced” water puzzles look absurdly annoying. And the vultures acting as prince magnets, ridiculous. The previous Prince of Persia failed in some parts, but at least it tried to do something interesting.

I dream of having my own flame exchange with Steve Jobs, but I’m too scared that he’ll hunt me down and kill my iPhone apps.

Besides, I make it a rule not to try and argue with people who are capable of shutting down a discussion with “What have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others’ work?”

In the first case I’d absolutely like to be back where I was. In the second case, however, this is only likely to confuse me and make me tap my way back to the timeline the next morning. It’s been ten hours; why would I still care to see the tweet I was looking at last night?

That’s a topic I’ve been pondering, particularly since the announcement of OS 4.0, with no good conclusion in sight, because it does get into mind-reading territory. What is it that my user is trying to do right now? (Why, hello, Clippy.)

For instance, Unicode always starts from a blank slate, because I assume that in most cases you want to start typing a new message, but there must be times when users are inconvenienced by that choice (not least of which, if they’ve been interrupted by a phone call in the middle of setting up text). And No Pic No Chat doesn’t remember where you were for the same reason: in most cases, you probably don’t really want it to (plus, there were slight technical complications, so I got lazy).

With multitasking in OS 4.0, though, that just doesn’t work so well anymore. When you switch away from an application, it’s going to remember its state as long as it’s in memory, whether the developer likes it or not (unless they actively work around that fact by resetting the app when it comes back to the front); but as soon as the OS removes it from memory, it’s going to start from scratch the next time it’s launched — making for a completely different user experience, for completely arbitrary reasons.

Switch away from Unicode to read a text message, then come back, and what you had originally typed is still in memory (whether you tap the app’s icon on the home screen or in the multitasking tray doesn’t make any difference, as far as I know). Switch away from Unicode to open a couple of really big websites in Safari, or play a video or whatever, and the OS will boot Unicode out of RAM, so the next launch will actually be a launch this time. Yet, as far as the user is concerned, their interaction with Unicode has been exactly the same in both cases — so their experience should also be exactly the same.

There’s no choice anymore, all apps pretty much have to save their state now (which is why Settings does, even if it can seem stupid, as Mrgan points out in his example). But what of those cases where you expect most users not to want their app’s state to be saved?

My recommendation is that apps should expire their saved states after n hours. What do I have in mind for n? That’s a hard call, but I’d pick a duration past which the human brain is unlikely to feel like it’s still “doing the same thing”. So, one hour, perhaps.

That’s a pretty interesting idea. (I wish I could have been bothered to have it myself.) When I get around to it, I might even go for something like fifteen minutes. If you’re away from Unicode for that long, you’re probably done with what you were working on.

P.S. While typing this I figured out a better way to handle the situation in Unicode — regardless of multitasking — so I’ll be posting an update someday soonish.

18 mai

In a letter to users, MySpace’s co-president Mike Jones on Monday outlined the company’s stance on privacy and its place within social networking, as well as detailing what he calls a “simplified” version of the social network’s privacy settings that will roll out to users in the next few weeks.

Awww, it’s so cute! Come on, guys, let’s all pretend for one day that we care at all about what MySpace does!

Adobe recently released its latest CS5 productivity suite for the Mac, and a few people have been experiencing a problem where applications (particularly Photoshop) seem to be crashing when they are quit.

19 mai

The lightweight site omits photos but includes core functionality like News Feed, status updates, profile Walls and messaging. And most important, Facebook has partnered with over 50 mobile carriers [worldwide] to offer free access to the site, without any data fees.

That’s a fascinating idea (going against the most basic concepts of net neutrality, mind you).

The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and served by Google servers.

This is pretty cool. Count on Google to optimize the code, and the binary downloads, better than anyone else; and the best news of all is that they are handling the whole license mess, and you don’t have to worry about anything if you’re using those web fonts.

But then, the point of web fonts is to personalize user experience, and how personalized will it really be when all sites use the same couple dozen fonts? (Even assuming that they expand the catalog over time.)

And, more importantly, I’m not convinced that web fonts are really that ready for public consumption — it appears that all browsers are standardizing on just hiding the text while its custom font loads, and that’s already happened to me a couple of times while browsing and I found it really annoying (it’s just awkward to have a blog post load, then its headings pop up ten seconds later).

On the other hand, if everyone starts using Google’s free fonts, everyone will have them in their browser’s cache already. So maybe we should really encourage it.

We wanted to give you even more ways to use your location, so today we’re announcing the Google Latitude API – an easy and safe way for you to use and reuse your Latitude location with any apps or services that you can imagine!

Yahoo did that with Fire Eagle, and failed (or didn’t try) to get it adopted. No doubt that Google is in a better position to make it, especially with Android and the new multitasking affordances for geolocation in iPhone OS 4.0.

With the current state of Apple’s relationship with Google, you have to wonder if we’ll get the functionality set up in the OS itself soon. (Google will have no problem submitting an app that updates your Latitude info, but you’ll always have to check the app is in your multitasking tray, and hasn’t been shut down to make room for a big video or game or whatever.)

That may be somewhat moot, though, because I can’t find in a cursory glance at the API any way to subscribe to a user’s location information — only the possibility of requesting it at any point in time. Which, if I’m not missing anything, makes the API somewhat useless for many use cases (until they add that capability).

I want to believe that he did put his career on the line for the Courier. (Allard is the guy who oversaw the entire development of Xbox and Zu… uh, let’s stick with Xbox. And I hope that doesn’t mean the platform will self-destruct over the next two years; Sony does not deserve to win by forfeit.)

There’s no appropriate way to post spoilery discussions on Twitter, so I have to come back to the blog to explain my thoughts on the Lost finale. All I could say in 140 characters without spoiling the whole thing is that Lost was in retrospect just like the Lord of the Rings, but that doesn’t work so well if you don’t already know what I mean.

Here it comes with proper spoiler tags, then.

<SPOILERS>

Many people are complaining that the overall arc of the show, in the end, is that nothing happened: those people met, and they became important to each other, and someday they died, and that is all. Well, they’re just wrong. (I’m only talking about the people who didn’t mistakenly understand that the whole island had been a purgatory. Can’t be helped, I guess; I found that Christian’s speech struck the exact right balance between under- and over-explanation.)

Lost’s six-year arc was a very simple story, but a story nonetheless: it was all about turning the island off for five minutes, so that the Monster could be killed (and so that he wouldn’t destroy the island, which the show tells us would pretty much be the end of the world, and you just have to accept that it is true).

Everything that happened along the way was just the obligatory adventures — the trials of fate, as it were — that the whole group had to go through in order to reach that very simple goal. Jacob needed someone to pull the island’s plug, someone to do the actual killing of his brother, and someone to take charge of the island after all that. So he brought Desmond and the Oceanic 815 to the island, and it took six seasons to fulfill that damn simple plan because, well, nothing is ever as simple as you’d like it to be, especially on a magical island.

In another universe and another time, Gandalf tasked a little hobbit with the very straightforward, uninteresting job of dropping a ring into a volcano, and hijinks ensued. The only difference, really, is that it took five and a half seasons for the audience (and the characters) to realize that the ring was the smoke monster, and how he had been created, and why he needed to be destroyed. That’s just because Jacob was clearly more of an ass than Gandalf was — and he arguably wasn’t quite as competent, either.

As for the sideways universe: yes, it was the biggest red herring of the show’s history. But after you’ve endured the entire second half of the first season, which was all red herring after red herring, you’re just not allowed to complain about that kind of device — the writers have showed they enjoy it, and it’s just an integral part of the show’s structure.

More importantly, the flashafterlifes constituted a season-long epilogue, and that’s a wonderful invention.

I’m not sure what this app does exactly (unless it’s “pretty much nothing”) but I know what it inspired me: the makers of FontExplorer, Font Agent Pro, and so on, need to make companion apps for iPad that synchronize with your library of fonts so you can browse thumbnails on the iPad when you’re trying to decide what typography to use in a design.

28 mai

Mobile user interface master Matias Duarte has left Palm and evidently hired on at the most obvious of places: Google.

Can Google even handle a UI designer? It’s not so long ago that another rockstar designer left Google, evidently discouraged by the company’s religious faith in data over design.

I have no doubt that Google realizes the Android UI needs to improve if it’s going to try and beat the iPhone — and poaching a designer of webOS removes any doubt you might still have. But are they at all able to listen to him?

By keeping a laser focus on key features and introducing them one at a time over a period of years, Apple taught and evangelized everything the consumer needed to know to understand the iPad from day one. Without that foundation, it’s not likely the product would have been nearly the success it has been.

That’s a great argument in favor of keeping your first release light on features. What matters is how early adopters experience your product; once you’ve got something that resembles mass adoption, it’s okay to introduce more functional complexity, because your existing users will have an easier learning curve and they will help new users. It’s that initial simplicity that Windows never really had. (Well, Windows 1.0 had simplicity; it just didn’t have users, or uses.)

You could even push the reasoning as far as saying that keeping third-party developers away from the iPhone for a year was the best thing Apple ever did.

After a week of using Android, I’m conflicted. If you had asked me last Wednesday what phone i’d be using a week from now I’d without a doubt say the iPhone. Now that we’re here, however, I am sticking with Android until the new iPhone ships. Widgets, home screen customization, background processes and the notification system are things that I’ve grown incredibly fond of and would miss if I went back to the iPhone today.

Do you hear that, Steve? Home screen customization and an interface to actually manage the goddamn notifications — that’s not something for which we should have to wait until OS 8.0.

Decreasing the amount of storage inside the Apple TV is interesting, but sort of obvious once you think about it running iPhone OS. No iPhone OS device has ever supported hard disk drives, and I doubt they ever will.

That’s silly. Just because no iPhone OS device has ever had a hard drive doesn’t mean an iPhone OS-based Apple TV couldn’t. Seems to me that adding hard drive support back to the OS (if it’s ever been taken out) is significantly less work than rewriting the entire system for a TV and 6-button remote.

As for the whole idea of an Apple TV using the iPhone OS, the bottomline is: I don’t care what it runs, and neither do you — whichever guts Apple uses for the device, the interface will always be entirely specific to its form factor. (Using the iPhone OS base helps setting up an App Store, but it wouldn’t be too hard to port the store mechanics to MacOS instead.)

It does matter, though, if the switch helps Apple get to the $100 price point. (Which is also the reason — not a technical one — for the new Apple TV not to have a hard drive.)

ASUS is really pushing the note taking feature with built-in notepad templates and the ability to store, sort, tag, and annotate your notes on the fly. It comes packing a MicroSD slot and 2 megapixel camera for snapping lecture slides which students or professionals can then annotate and then sync back to a PC over USB.

In other words, Asus took all that free Courier R&D from Microsoft and used it to make a cheap device that I kinda want. (And which would make me cry every time I use it, thinking of what could have been.)